borderlands
e-journal
www.borderlands.net.au
VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2 , 2009
Aesthetic Revolution, the Staging of (‘Homosexual’)
Equality and Contemporary Art
Roger Cook
Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London
This paper discusses the aesthetic staging of same-sex equality in
contemporary art in relation to Jacques Rancière’s engagement with
the fields of contemporary art, aesthetics and art history, and the
‘wrong’ of domination. It uses Rancière’s ideas of disagreement and
disidentification to deal with the problematic categorization of samesex identification. Rancière shows that art viewed from within the
contemporary aesthetic regime must be made in the name of the
anonym, the name of anyone and everyone. Rancière illuminates the
staging of equality with regard to the egalitarian aesthetics of
photography, the political disturbance of the uncanny, and the
contradictory torsion between the autonomy of art and the
heteronomy of life. The paradox of the aesthetic revolution is that art
is radically political not according to the ways it conveys messages
concerning issues or identities, but as it frames an indifferent
convivium: the liberty and equality of a common aesthetic.
Aesthetics and the practice of equality
Marking a growing art world interest in the work of Jacques Rancière,
in March 2007, one of the world’s leading contemporary art
magazines devoted a number of pages to his work. One contributor
speculated that one reason for this interest might be that the paradox
intentionally lodged at its core reflected contemporary art’s own
contradictions (Funcke, 2007: 283). For some years Rancière has
been making interventions in a field he describes as a dispositif of the
aesthetic regime of art (Rancière, 2009b: 23). His most provocative
and productive challenge has been his belief that the accepted
teleology of avant-garde ‘modernism’ is unhelpful ‘when it comes to
thinking about contemporary forms of art and the relation between
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aesthetics and politics’ (Rancière, 2004a: 20). To try to clarify matters,
he distinguishes three historically sequential, but presently co-existent
‘regimes’ of art, broadly associated with the ancient, classical and
modern periods which he names: the ethical, representational and
aesthetic. In the ancient world art had no autonomy; images were
questioned solely for their truth: for their effect on the ideology and
ethos of individuals and the community. In the representational regime
works of art are no longer subject to the laws of truth or the common
rules of utility but belong to the sphere of imitation, though not so
much as copies of reality but ways of imposing form on matter. As
such, they are subject to norms: hierarchy of genres, adequation of
expression to subject matter, correspondence between the arts, etc.
The aesthetic regime ‘overthrows this normativity and the relationship
between form and matter on which it is based. Works of art are now
defined as such, by belonging to a specific sensorium that stands out
as an exception from the normal regime of the sensible’ (Rancière,
2002: 135). The revolution of the aesthetic regime emerged fully
during the eighteenth century with its manifesto reflected in the
writings of Schiller, Winckelmann and Kant. Schiller said that aesthetic
experience ‘bear[s] the edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the art
of living […] aesthetic experience is effective inasmuch as it is the
experience of that and. It grounds the autonomy of art, to the extent
that it connects it to the hope of “changing life”’ (Rancière, 2002: 134).
Understanding the politics of aesthetics involves understanding the
ways that the autonomy of art is linked to the heteronomy of life:
The key formula of the aesthetic regime of art is that art is an
autonomous form of life. This is a formula, however, that can be
read in two different ways: autonomy can be stressed over life, or
life over autonomy—and these lines of interpretation can be
opposed, or they can intersect.
Such oppositions and intersections can be traced as the interplay
between three major scenarios. Art can become life. Life can become
art. Art and life can exchange their properties. These three scenarios
yield three configurations of the aesthetic, emplotted in three versions
of temporality. According to the logic of the and, each is also a variant
of the politics of aesthetics, or what we should rather call its
‘metapolitics’—that is, its way of producing its own politics, proposing
to politics rearrangements of its space, reconfiguring art as a political
issue, or asserting itself as true politics (Rancière, 2002: 137).
Thematized in the Kantian aesthetic, it is this new form of the
distribution of the sensible that Schiller captured with the term ‘play’:
an activity that has no other form than itself and no desire to dominate
(Rancière, 2009: 30).
Jean-Phillipe Deranty, one of Rancière’s most perspicacious French
commentators writing in English asks: ‘What does it mean to talk
about equality regarding a practice, notably regarding the techniques
and practices of art? And what is equality in experience, notably in
aesthetic experience?’ (Deranty, 2007: 242). This complex question
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engages head on, the tense relational twist between the autonomy of
‘art’ and the heteronomy of ‘forms of life’ that Rancière has discussed
in his writings on aesthetics and politics, and most particularly and
recently, in relation to photography (Rancière, 2004a, 2007a, 2009a).
In writing thus, Deranty accords with declarations of the indissoluble
inherence of the political in what Rancière calls the aesthetic partition
and distribution of sensible experience (le partage du sensible) ––
making ‘visible what had been excluded from the perceptual field’ and
‘audible what used to be inaudible’ (Rancière, 2003: 226). Rooted in
the senses, art is inherently democratic; the immediacy of its aesthetic
impact shared, felt and sensed ‘organoleptically,’ before being
understood; creating a platform––a ‘convivium’––which celebrates
equality (Panagia, 2007: 177; 2009: 140-45). As Rancière phrases it,
art is:
political as its own practices shape forms of visibility that reframe
the way in which practices, manners of being and modes of feeling
and saying are interwoven in a commonsense, which means a
"sense of the common" embodied in a common sensorium.
(Rancière, 2005: n.p.)
‘Equality’ Rancière insists ‘is not a goal to be attained but a point of
departure, a supposition to be maintained in all circumstances’
(Rancière, 1991: 138). Beneath social inequality and domination there
lies a more foundational equality such as Jean Genet famously
recounted, when, ‘in a third class car, between Salon and SaintRambert-D’Ablon,’ he: ‘Suddenly knew the painful–yes, painful
feeling, that any man was exactly–sorry, but I want to emphasize
“exactly”–“worth” any other man’ (Genet, 2003: 91-101).
For Rancière, it was the discovery of the writings of the nineteenth
century Ignorant Schoolmaster Joseph Jacotot, that caused him to
oppose emancipatory movements based on identity claims to those
based on universality (Rancière, 1991; Deranty, 2003: 146), thus
granting everyone the potential freedom to play or act out the equality
of their intelligence (Rancière, 1999: 88). What might the art of
subjects whose same sex subjectification has been inhibited by the
world they inhabit have to show with regard to this? For Rancière, art
performs the same task as politics, re-organizing accepted
perceptions of reality (Deranty, 2003: 137). At the start of his
description of ‘A Personal Itinerary’ Rancière tells how he pursued
‘two or three questions that are, at once, very simple and very
complicated’:
How do individuals get some idea in their heads that makes them
either satisfied with their position or indignant about it? How are
representations of self and other––which sustain hierarchy,
consensus or conflict––formed and transformed? (Rancière, 2003:
xxv).
Such questions are fundamental to the pursuit of homosexual equality
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and its staging. Rancière takes issue with the consensual nature of
identity politics; for Rancière, ‘the essence of politics is a dissensus’
(Rancière, 2001: 12). At its best, the contemporary art world is a
model of Rancière's notion of democracy as ‘disagreement’ (la
mésentente): the perpetual struggle by ‘the part with no part’ (le part
sans-part) for equality in the ‘distribution or partition of the sensible’ (le
partage du sensible). One might also say that the history of art is a
model of Rancière's view that the subject comes about through disidentification. It is always by dis-identifying from what has gone before
that contemporary art and artists emerge; and one might add, it is disidentification that asserts difference and demonstrates equality. As
queer theorist Michael Warner understands it: ‘the activity we
undertake with each other’ is ‘a kind of agonistic performance’
dependent on our interactions with others, bringing into being the
space of our world, which is then the background against which we
understand ourselves and our belonging. This world is not predesignated, ‘but one disclosed in practice’ immanent to history ‘unlike
ideas of community or identity, which tend to be naturalized as stable
or originary’ (Warner, 2000: n.p.). The policing of identity has been the
curse of the history of the relatively recent invention of
‘homosexuality,’ alongside ‘heterosexuality’ (Foucault, 1990; Katz,
1995). Stabilizing identity is exactly what Rancière wishes to resist:
which makes any discussion of sexuality in terms of identities inimical
to his work; his investment is not in subjects but in processes of
subjectivation and dis-identification. Ultimately, then, one might say
that Rancière’s understanding of art and politics is a ‘queer’ one,
insofar as he believes that both must be radically disruptive of the
policies of established order which keep everyone in place.
Queering categorization
In this paper I propose to examine the aesthetic regime’s torsion
between art and life––with regard to the singularity of queer
subjectivation––in the creative practice of some contemporary artists
who share a common investment in the democratic aesthetics of
equality: a belief that aesthetic experience is open to all who open
themselves to its disruptions, ‘to the gaze of anyone at all’ (Rancière,
2009b: 13).
Inequality is something that homosexuals share, part sans-part with
other stigmatized minorities: a past history of subjugation, nonrecognition: non-celebration, hence the significance of the actively
celebratory term 'queer.' This category originating as a term of insult
was reclaimed by the same-sex community in the early 90s as a nongendered alternative term of 'affirmative difference' to 'gay,' 'lesbian'
and 'homosexual' all terms which are subject to continuing discursive
dissensus. Interestingly ‘queer’ bears an etymological relation to the
legal term for being wronged–tort– through the Latin verb to twist
(torquere). The translation of tort as wrong, though not incorrect, fails
to disclose its legal dimension: that of the injustice of being wronged.
However, tort is not simply a juridical category since ‘a wrong does
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not occur between determined parties and cannot be resolved by
juridical procedures. A wrong can only be treated by modes of political
subjectivization that reconfigure the field of experience’ (Panagia,
2006: 89; Rancière, 2004a: 93). As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pointed
out ‘queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive–recurrent,
eddying, troublant. The word "queer" itself means across–it comes
from the Indo-European root–twerkw, which also yields the German
quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart” (Kosofsky
Sedgwick, 1994: 8). Its usage need not be confined to homosexuality:
'queer' can refer to the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps,
dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning
when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's
sexuality are made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically
(Sedgwick, 1994: 8)
Presupposition of equality does not have to be recognized
consciously for it to be effective, ‘in order for a democratics to occur. It
is usually explicit, but it can be implicit’ (May, 2008a: 58). Under the
rubric 'camouflage and provocation' the politics of equality in queer
aesthetic practices can be divided into two main categories: implicit
and explicit. The former operating in a coded manner, the latter
declarative. In a recent interview Terence Davies respectfully
differentiated himself from fellow film maker Derek Jarman on his
categorization as ‘gay film maker,’ declaring himself a film maker who
happens to be gay; the distinction might seem trivial, but it is
important. Categorizing essentializes: reducing art to a specific
destiny, compromising its universality and therefore the equality of
aesthetic experience.
Rancière states that he is concerned with ‘aesthetic acts as
configurations of experience that create new modes of sense
perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity’ (Rancière,
2004a: 9) –– as good a definition as any of what makes art vital and
emancipatory. The question of how the political agency of art is
embodied in the artwork, how its meaning (sens) is organoleptically
present in the sensory in the materiality of its ‘flesh’ and not just in the
rhetoric outside of it, is central to the specificity of the aesthetic
revolution, which is no doubt why Rancière entitled his book on the
‘politics of writing’ The Flesh of Words (Rancière, 2004b: 13). This is
especially important for art dealing with sexual politics and the political
subjectivization of sexual minorities. As Rancière’s fellow philosopher
states in his ‘maxims of affirmationist art’: ‘Art cannot be the
expression of a particularity, whether ethnic or egoistic. It is the
impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to all’ (Badiou,
2006: 143). ‘Non-imperial art’ Badiou says ‘is related to a kind of
aristocratic-proletarian ethic: it does what it says, without
distinguishing between kinds of people’ (Badiou, 2003: n.p.). As
Rancière writes: the name of any ‘injured community that invokes its
rights is always the name of the anonym, the name of anyone’ and its
‘universality is not enclosed in citizen or human being; it is involved in
the "what follows," in its discursive and practical enactment’
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(Rancière, 1992: 60). No matter on whose behalf, the battle for
equality is a battle for all, though scepticism regarding categorization
in no way precludes artists’ investment in the history of their specific
form of sexual culture through their work. In short, categorisations
regarding same-sexuality are paradoxical, suspensive, paratactical,
non-identical (Deranty, 2003: 146), which is why in the title of this
paper I decided to put (‘homosexual’) under erasure, suspended,
bracketed and in inverted commas.
Interestingly for Rancière, aesthetics is suspensive: ‘a way of thinking
the paradoxical sensorium’ that ‘makes it possible to define the things
of art’ (Rancière, 2009b: 11). ‘Aesthetic experience is experience of
the ambivalent’ (Rancière, 2008a: 73), ‘its identification with a way of
life is a structural contradiction of the aesthetic regime of art’
(Rancière, 2000: 23). The pure category 'art' is mixed with the impurity
of non-art: ‘art is art to the extent that it is something else than art. It is
always “aestheticized”, meaning that it is always posed as a “form of
life"’ (Rancière, 2002: 137; Guénoun, 2000: 252; Rancière, 2004a:
26). To take a contemporary example: the artist Lukas
Duwenhögger’s 2007 competition proposal for a public memorial in
Berlin to the ‘Homosexual Victims of National Socialism.’ This dealt
humorously with same-sex experience (cottaging–‘tea room trade’) by
taking the theatrical form of a ‘Celestial Teapot’ performing the
historically resonant and defiantly ‘camp’ akimbo gesture (King, 1994:
20-43; King, 2008: 41-138), with disruptive vigour and conviction on
behalf of this specifically dominated form of life. Such a monument is
patently frivolous and absurd, yet it disturbs: in Rancièrean
phraseology ‘disturbing in the very scenery of the sensible’ and its
distribution (Rancière, 2008a: 74) the humourless male fantasies of
Nazi domination. As Jan Verwoert has suggested, ‘Duwenhögger (b.
1955) who lives and works in Istanbul addresses the viewer as a
knowledgeable reader of queer codes’ in which ‘the Dandyist
revolution is realized in barely visible gestures of refined symbolic
meaning,’ an ‘art of innuendo […] for surviving under repressive social
conditions.’ After asking whether these codes might not be just
affirming the world as it is rather than envisioning it as it might
possibly be, Verwoert positively asserts the successful public staging
of homosexual equality in Duwenhögger’s work, indicating that there
is an imaginative concept of freedom, the ‘liberating humour’ of a
‘different universe’ which embodies ‘a promise of other potential
realities’ so that ‘you can’t help but smile at the heightened awareness
it gives you the viewer of your theatrical presence on the stage of the
exhibition space’ (Verwoert, 2004).
The ambivalence felt toward all terms relating to homosexuality by
those who undergo them is only too understandable given this
problem of categorisation, a term stemming from the Greek
kathegoresthai, which originally meant to accuse someone in public
(Bourdieu, 1990: 27). It would seem that there is little choice but to
recognize the tragically absurd double-bind of symbolic domination:
the question of how one can revolt against a socially imposed
categorization except by organizing oneself according to it, thus
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implementing the classifications and restrictions that one resists as
well as fighting for a new sexual order in which such distinctions
would be indifferent (Bourdieu, 2002: 120). This is why Rancière
stresses the refusal of identity and the significance of dis-identification
for subjectivation, understanding politics as a process of
declassification, of abandoning the identity one is given in the policing
of the social order (May, 2008a: 50), and why gay and lesbian
identification can only be made strategically and ‘queer’ seen as a
form of dis-identification or ‘unbecoming.’ In the introduction to a
journal issue devoted to ‘unbecoming’ Jean Paul Ricco quotes a
significant passage from Jean-Luc Nancy regarding the question of a
communal space of politics where he suggests that a ‘being-incommon’ ‘would operate a transitivity, not a substantiality’ (Nancy,
1997: 90; Ricco, 2005: 1). For Rancière, ‘Political being-together is a
being-between: between identities, between worlds […] between
several names, several identities’ (Rancière, 1999: 137-8). The beingin-common of ‘queer’ is just such a transitive rather than substantive
subjectification and it might well be added to Rancière’s statement
about how the dissidents of the Eastern bloc adopting the term
‘hooligan’ with which they were stigmatized by the heads of these
regimes, and demonstrators in the Paris of 1968 declared ‘We are all
German Jews,’ thus exposing ‘for all to see the gap between political
subjectification … and any kind of identification’ (Rancière, 1999: 30).
For homosexuals to accept categorizations unequivocally would be to
accept themselves in the police order as marginalized subjects. As
Todd May puts it: ‘The project of a democratic politics, a politics of
equality, is to reject the marginalized position to which one has been
assigned, not for the sake of another or different position, but for the
sake of nothing at all other than one's own equality’ (May, 2008a: 49).
One might see this non-identitarianism, as a Foucauldian
‘desubstantialization of sexuality’ (Ricco, 2002: 19) reflected in the
anonymity, indetermination and non-affirmative anybody-everybodyness (21) of the Interim 1992-93 and Songs of Sentient Beings 1995
series of photographs by Bill Jacobson (b.1955) or the promiscuous
anonymity of Stephen Barker’s photographs of nocturnal cruising in
Nightswimming (Barker, 1999). As John Rajchman once put it: ‘Once
we give up the belief that our life-world’ is grounded in identity ‘we
may come to a point where ungroundedness is no longer experienced
as existential anxiety […] but as a freedom and lightness […]’
(Rajchman, 1998: 88).
This problematic of queer identification has been expressed by the
contemporary photographer Collier Schorr (b.1963). Schorr prefers
not to be publicly identified as lesbian, not because she wishes to
remain in the closet but because such identification adversely narrows
the focus of how her work is read. Because of her assertive manner in
dealing with male rituals and military and sport fetishes, her
photographic concerns can be reduced to a homoerotic or queer
perspective. One of her own best-known statements contributed to
this. When she was asked why she photographed wrestlers and
soldiers, but not girls, she answered: ‘I do, I just use boys to do it’
(Schorr, 2004) and says she is interested in what her life might have
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been like had she been a boy. She has problems when her work is
ascribed a primarily gay context. ‘The word “queer” has too much
content in it’ and she would rather ‘be seen as an artist than queer’
(Schorr, 2008). She, and her photographs can nonetheless be
understood as ‘queer’ in the sense that they subtly trouble normative
notions of gender. Like Rancière, Schorr and fellow artist Sharon
Hayes (b. 1970, USA), are more interested in ‘the performative
operations of subject formation’ (Hayes, 2006: 36): subjectification
rather than identification (Rancière, 1992: 61; 1999: 36). ‘Queer’
which initially freed homosexuals from the prison of categorization, in
turn becomes overdetermined; there is the need again to neutralize
language, ‘release the prisoners: […] scatter the signified […]’
(Barthes, 1977: 50): ‘it is within speech that speech must be fought,
led astray––not by the message of which it is the instrument, but by
the play of words of which it is the theater’ (Barthes, 1979: 6). This
does not mean however that Hayes is not interested in political
activism as her extraordinary Revolutionary Love project in which at
the US Republican and Democratic conventions a group of between
70-100 people simultaneously spoke a text put together by Hayes
about love, politics, gay power, and gay liberation, demonstrates; not
to mention her other performative political projects in which she
performs acts of appropriation in relation to political speeches of the
60s and 70s. Hayes is a contemporary artist inventing new forms of
aesthetic/political intervention.
After the failure of 20th century vanguards to place art in the service of
ideology by homogenizing art and politics, we know that there can be
no prescriptive agenda for either; so there can be no type of art that
we recognize as 'homosexual.' There is only art that tacitly or explicitly
relates to same sex experience that either carries aesthetic conviction
or not, and thereby asserts the equality of that experience. In other
words, art, indifferent to politics as such, may still have metapolitical
effects. Rancière frequently cites Flaubert's aristocratic indifference to
democracy whilst paradoxically writing democratically of the
‘splendour of the insignificant.' What is distinctive about art is its
capacity to invent new forms, ‘at a disruptive distance from inherited
norms and expectations,’ its capacity for active aesthetic provocation
rather than simple recognition (Hallward, 2001: xx). The
transformative joy of such provocation and its maintenance is central
to Rancière’s thinking.
In 1953 the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) acted in
accordance with this, by painting Two Figures, which has been
described as one of ‘the most provocative homosexual images of our
epoch’ (Farson, 1993). Though deriving from an Eadweard Muybridge
photograph of wrestlers, it patently represents two male figures
engaged in violent sexual activity; furthermore it did this when such
acts even in private were a criminal offence; Bacon referred to it as
‘The Bed of Crime.’ The production of such an image in 1953 was a
brave aesthetico-political act painted some fourteen years before such
acts (in private) were legitimized in English law. Then as if anticipating
this law, in 1954 he painted Two Figures in the Grass: the same sex
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act depicted in open public space. Identifying with the criminal
underworld, Bacon famously and defiantly enjoyed his dominated
deviant social status and cared little for liberalizing homosexual
equality. Indeed one might ask exactly what sexual equality means?
There is disagreement on this; there are assimilationists for whom
homosexual equality represents consensuality with heterosexual
normativity, legal parity, marital rights etc., and those who want none
of it, asserting homosexual experience as fundamentally dissensually
non-monogamously different.
The staging of equality
‘Against the imperative of propriety, the aesthetic regime of art asserts
indifference of style in relation to the represented subject’ (Deranty,
2007: 243). Style no longer has anything to do with what is being
represented in the hierarchical modes of representation of classical
art but is a kind of ‘absolute way of seeing things’ (Rancière, 2004c:
147). In the ‘aesthetic’ regime, any object is worthy of artistic
representation, down to the ‘readymade’: the Duchampian urinal and
the Warholian soupcan or Brillo box (Deranty, 2007: 245). Here art is
the concentrated expression of meaning that is already that of the
world itself. The oligarchic hierarchy of perception: genres, subjects
and media, categories that pre-ordered experience in the
representative regime, give way to a joyful ‘aesthetics of chaosmos’: a
stylistic ‘explosion’ where meaning sinks into ‘the rhythm of bodily
states’ (Rancière, 2007: 45). ‘Egalitarian society is only ever the set of
egalitarian relations that are traced here and now through singular
and precarious acts […] among those who know how to share with
anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence’ inspiring
‘courage, and hence joy’ (Rancière, 2006: 97).
Aesthetic indifference to hierarchies of subject matter is evident in the
vast range of subjects and the manner of installation of the
wonderfully open and democratic contemporary photographic project
of Wolfgang Tillmans (b.1968). Continuing the photographic project
initiated by photographers like David Octavius Hill of ‘the appropriation
of the commonplace’ (Rancière, 2004a: 33) his photographic opus
embodies the egalitarian spirit in the particularly vivid way that
Rancière describes in The Politics of Aesthetics as:
the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined
form and a determined content. Yet what is this indifference after all
if not the very quality of everything that comes to pass […] available
to everyone's eyes? This equality destroys all of the hierarchies of
representation and also establishes a community […] as a
community without legitimacy, a community formed only by […]
random circulation […]. (Rancière, 2004a: 14)
Tillman invites us to share the equal power of visual intelligence ‘with
anybody and everybody’; it has a special political and aesthetic
resonance with regard to issues concerning freedom of expression,
sensuality, sexuality, the body, and the ever-present threat of
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extinction as a consequence of AIDS. The banal fact that he could
place a photograph of two men kissing on the first page of his US tour
catalogue is a freedom won for all who value the expression of
equality whatever their sexual orientation. As Daniel Birnbaum put it
so eloquently in that catalogue:
His work is always that of an embodied subject […] These
phenomena are […] seen by someone, and this someone is a
social being living in a body and relating to other humans.
(Birnbaum, 2006: 24)
The strongest element of that embodiedness is his emboldened belief
in conviviality, in a ‘utopian ideal of to-getherness’ (Tillmans, 2002:
13), something he discovered early on in the gay clubbing scene in
London. This sense of communal being-in-the-world is present at
many different levels in his work, from his evident desire to share his
lens based joys of discovery, to the single and group portraits of
friends and acquaintances, to the erotically charged intimacy of his
abstract works: Blushes, Peaches, Frieischwimmer; all this, as he has
said, against the deathly background of personal loss from AIDS
which makes companionship and comradeship all the more
significant, enhancing the fragile intensity of life. AIDS has cast a long
shadow over the art world, whilst at the same time demonstrating the
extraordinary resourcefulness and range of abilities as artists have
dealt with the issue of homosexual equality in a time of plague without
succumbing to victimhood or giving way to self pity.
In every sense of the word there is something more than a little
‘queer’ about the work of Enrico David (b. 1966), one of the most
engaging artists to have emerged in Britain in recent years.
Nominated for the 2009 Turner prize for his solo exhibitions How Do
You Love Dzzzzt By Mammy? at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst,
Basel, and Bulbous Marauder at the Seattle Art Museum, his 2007
exhibition at London’s ICA was hailed as one of the best exhibitions
that venue had had for decades. It contained many theatrical and
musical references, and it is perhaps worth remembering that the
terms ‘theatrical’ and ‘musical’ were once euphemisms for
homosexual. David’s is a dandaistic world in which ‘things are freed
from the drudgery of being useful’ (Thompson, 2009: n.p.). In his own
words, his work borrows ‘from traditional craft techniques and design
styles, using their pre-given rules and functional potential in an
attempt to organize and give structure to the often chaotic nature of
[his] emotional response to reality.’ In embracing design and craft
David joins the growing band of artists since the sixties who broke the
‘modernist’ embargo on the divide between ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ art
(Rancière refers to this in his articles ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and Its
Outcomes,’ 2002, and ‘The Surface of Design,’ 2007).
In the summer of 2007, David spoke about his work Chicken Man
Gong (2005) shown at the Stedelijk, commissioned by Tate Britain in
2005. This two-part work, consisting of a gong and a display case,
subtly questions accepted beliefs about authority and the gendered
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identity of the artist’s relation to the viewer in a public art situation. In
Chicken Man Gong, David has created a complex web of narratives
and allusions to a variety of cultural sources. The gong stands on a
leg that is clad in fishnet stockings, taken from the work of the French
artist Pierre Molinier (1900-1976) known for his fetishistic
photographic self-portraits in drag. In addition to this, the statue has a
multicoloured tail and a head with an androgynous face. In short:
Chicken Man Gong is an elegant hybrid figure ‘dedicated to the spirit,
joy and honour of Chickeninity or Chickenhood’ (Verwoert, 2009: 59).
Chicken Man Gong plays a theatrical and ritual role in the museum;
during the exhibition the artist telephoned a museum employee with
the order to sound the gong, bringing the work to the public’s notice.
This work amply demonstrated the way David employs his own set of
invented codes to subtly subvert established orders in life and art. The
work also references what one might see as a ‘queer’ side of the
Bauhaus aesthetic manifest in the mechanized manikin figure work of
Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) and his Triadic Ballet (1927). In fact
David utilizes formal vocabularies from the past, particularly from the
20s and 30s quite knowingly but never totally nostalgically since he
always injects them with a quirkiness of his own making. Staging is
indeed the word to describe David’s modus operandi. The twentythree gouaches that make up the work entitled Shitty Tantrum 2006-7
is, according to the text that is part of the work, loosely based on the
imaginative narrative of a ‘play’ of his own invention. In his Spring
2008 exhibition at the Daniel Buchholz Gallery in Cologne entitled
“Bulbous Marauder” he references the Commedia del Arte. The text
accompanying this work (which can be found by following the links to
David’s work on the Daniel Bucholz website) like that of ‘Shitty
Tantrum,’ invites the viewer to circle down ‘queerly’ into its multiple
levels of meaning.
There is a not so innocent playfulness in all these works that engages
the polymorphous perversity of childhood, hence the references to
asses and anality both iconographically and in the titles of works like
the fetishistic manikin Sodulator. Manikins and dolls feature in much
of David’s work, evoking the mechanical dolls and toys in the tales of
E.T.A Hoffman, Freud’s ‘unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature’
(Freud, 1990: 339-76). We might note the relation of uncanny to
queer, as ‘the name for everything that ought to have remained ...
secret and hidden but has come to light’ (Freud, 1990: 345). Citing a
paper by Jentsch, Freud remarks that waxwork figures, dolls and
automata are liable to arouse an uncanny feeling, especially when
there is uncertainty about whether an apparently animate being is
really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object may not in fact be
animate. Consciously or not, David invokes the unheimlich in his
irresolvable visual narratives, of which one can make, neither head
nor tail. We might ask ourselves whether the artist is unraveling some
childhood trauma, for children experience the enigmatic signifiers of
the primal family scene as incomprehensible and therefore uncanny
(Laplanche, 1992). David’s work would seem to invoke childhood
memories as with the tableau Ultra Paste 2007 which attempts to
reproduce and thereby re-imagine some kind of ‘queer’ anally related
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sexual trauma in the paternally designed bedroom of his childhood,
where a dark brown stain seeps across the floor of this hygienic
space. To paraphrase Rancière, in David’s work the elements are
always ambivalent because of meaning and its withdrawal; when we
look at it, we see a politics of aesthetics using forms of disturbance or
the uncanny (Rancière, 2008a: 74). As we have seen for Rancière
‘subjectification is a disidentification, removal from the naturalness of
place’ (Rancière, 1999: 36) and David actively engages the spectator:
‘art emancipates […] how we have to understand, how we have to
see, how we have to read, and what we have to understand […] what
emancipates is precisely the possibility of […] the viewer constructing
or reconstructing that efficiency himself or herself’ (Rancière, 2008b:
180).
Confronting history
Finally, I turn to two artists whose work I can only inadequately touch
upon in the space available. Their work challenges the ordered
hierarchies of the classical representational regime by staging equality
with regard to the hybridity of race, gender and sexuality with the hope
of changing the world. Rancière has declared a discomfort with the
notion of hybridity ‘because it seems to refer much more to the
constitution of a subject rather than to processes of subjectivization’
(Rancière, 2008: 74-5). This is true if hybridity is seen as a static mix
of determinate identities but not if it is seen transversally as the
dislocating motion of disidentification: ‘Hybrid catches the fragmentary
subject formation of people whose identities traverse different race,
sexuality, and gender identifications’ (Muñoz, 1999: 31-2). Hybridity
coupled with disidentification have proved significant terms for postcolonial queer theory (Muñoz, 1999: 31). José Esteban Muñoz sees
disidentification as a strategy situated between identification and
counteridentification, a third mode of dealing with dominant ideology,
one that opts for neither assimilation nor opposition, but uses
disidentificatory humour as a ‘mode of performance’ to transform a
cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact a ‘redistribution of
the sensible’– a ‘structural change […] valuing the importance of
everyday struggles of resistance’ (Muñoz, 1999: 15, 11-12). It ‘can be
understood as a way of shuffling back and forth between reception
and production […] a mode of understanding the movements and
circulations of identificatory force’ (Muñoz, 1999: 15, 30).
Juan Dávila (b.1946) was born in Santiago, but left Chile and moved
to Australia in 1974, shortly after Augusto Pinochet seized power, and
ever since his work has addressed this personal sense of rupture and
the conviction that art should speak critically of those in power
(Eichler, 2007). Dávila’s work frequently reveals the sexual economy
that underlies power, something his own homosexuality no doubt
enabled him to understand from within. His work which is both
shockingly carnal and extremely sophisticated in its play with visual
codes, can arouse strong critical responses, one critic voicing the
views of the silent majority in a right wing newspaper by repressively
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describing his work as the high camp pornographic folk art of a
political cartoonist undeserving of attention outside of Australia
(Dorment, 2007). Such strong reactions can be seen as a measure of
the aesthetico-political challenge of his work which disturbs the
‘relationship that exists between the autonomy of the spaces reserved
for art and its apparent contrary: art's involvement in constituting
forms of common life’ (Rancière, 2009b: 26). This is why a seasoned
and informed viewer, such as the writer on South American art, Guy
Brett, believes that his work needs to be registered first for its visual
impact, describing that impact as switching between ‘refinement and
tackiness, mimicry and invention, disgust and celebration, scorn and
affection’ (Brett, 2006: 2). Brett goes on to describe the work as a
‘battlefield’ believing that this is where ‘its ethical core really lies’–‘in
anger over injustice […] whether in lived life or in the mediating
domain of visual culture.’ Much of his visual language is indebted to
the quotidian world of comic strips and their incursion into the world of
fine art through 1960s Pop. Since Dávila’s work emerged in the 1980s
in the wake of notions of postmodernism, it is perhaps worth recalling
Rancière reminding us that: ‘If there is a political question in
contemporary art, it will not be grasped in terms of a
modern/postmodern opposition’ but ‘through an analysis of the
metamorphoses of […] the politics founded on the play of the
exchanges and displacements between the art world and that of nonart’ (Rancière, 2009b: 51).
I first saw Dávila’s work in 1994 in Juanito Laguna a memorable
exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery, London, which consisted of a
huge hybrid floor piece, riffing on the narratives of the popular
Argentinian artist Antonio Berni’s (1905-81) poor boy of the Buenos
Aires slums (Juanito Laguna), Bungaree (1770-1830), the Australian
aboriginal who dressed in cast off European uniforms, entertained and
acted as go-between for European settlers in Australia and the
celebrated painting Inhabitant of the Cordilleras of Peru (1855)
produced in Paris by the Peruvian painter Francisco Laso (1823-69).
In the same year Dávila was included in the international exhibition
Unbound: Possibilities in Painting at the Hayward Gallery, London. It
was there that he exhibited his depiction of Simón Bolívar, liberator of
a number of Latin American countries, as a transsexual on a half
fading horse, obscenely giving the finger to the viewer. This caused a
major uproar in Chile in 1994 and even strained diplomatic relations
with Venezuela, whose embassy issued a formal complaint against
Dávila’s image when it was circulated as a postcard. The Chilean
Foreign Ministry itself formally apologized to the governments of
Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. It is through an analysis of
Dávila’s portrait and its ‘iconoclastic challenge to all the absolutes
represented by Bolívar’ (Conway, 2003: 2) that Christopher Conway
discussed the ‘cult of Bolívar,’ the conservative hero, who like all
unmovable idols stands for reified and eternal values in need of
transformation (Mejías-López, 2005: 146-60). ‘Dávila has said, that for
him the question of sexual repression is as important as political
repression and has tended to be ignored in the rhetoric of liberation’
(Brett, 1990: 106).
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borderlands 8:2
Kent Monkman (b. 1965) is of mixed racial origins, half Cree Indian
and half Anglo Irish and plays mischievously with same-sexuality,
race,
recreating
nineteenth
century
romantic
landscape
representations of untrammelled sublimity, peopling his landscapes
with natives and colonialists, reversing the roles of domination and
exposing repressed homoeroticism in colonialism. Monkman trained
as an illustrator and acquired the skills to convincingly mock the
pretensions of the colonist’s genre of painting; and this is not all, for
Monkman is a sophisticated conceptual post-performative artist
utilizing theatrical talent as set designer, installation creator, film
maker and performance artist. In a massive seven by twelve foot
canvas entitled Trappers of Men, Monkman recreates a western
landscape that the German-American painter Albert Bierstadt wrought
in his 1867 canvas In the Mountains. But unlike Bierstadt's
unpopulated original, this 2006 update is teeming with bodies. Barechested white pioneers talk and trade with dark, muscular young
natives; the explorers Lewis and Clark wander through, lost and
uncertain; and photographer Edward S. Curtis and painters Jackson
Pollock and Piet Mondrian are shocked by the appearance of Share
Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a glammed-up cross-dressing native
character who stands on the surface of the water, voguing in a campy
take on Botticelli's Venus.
As Rancière attests humour is the virtue to which contemporary artists
most readily ascribe (Rancière, 2009b: 54). In Robin's Hood the film of
the performance he created as part of Jimmie Durham’s exhibition
‘The American West’ at Compton Verney in 2005, Miss Chief Eagle
Testickle, a wandering artist from the Great Plains of North America,
journeys across the seas to study the unspoiled European Male in his
native habitat in the UK. S/he meets the handsome Robin Hood in
Sherwood Forest, but realises too late that one can never trust a white
man, especially on his own turf! Miss (Share) Chief Eagle Testickle –
whose name plays on both ‘mischief’ and ‘egotistical’ – is a towering,
raven-haired transvestite in four-inch heels. Monkman has developed
this persona in performance, video and photographic works as well as
in his paintings. Rancière says that ‘the place of a political subject is
an interval or a gap: being together to the extent that we are in
between––between names, identities, cultures’ (Rancière, 1992: 62).
In an interview for the National Gallery of Canada, Monkman declares
that he is trying to define the space between two cultures.
To conclude let us briefly consider aspects of Rancière’s ‘theatocratic’
presentation of equality that might be considered problematic. Peter
Hallward raised the question of the inability of theatrically sporadic
and improvisational interventions to instantiate continuity of change,
and asked to what extent Rancière’s conception of equality remains a
‘merely transgressive one, and thus condemned to a variant of that
same dialectic of dependence, provocation and exhaustion that he
diagnoses so effectively in the logics of modernism and
postmodernism’ (Hallward, 2006: 123). Hallward raises the common
problem of the relationship between real world politics, social change
and the kind of imaginative transformations that art projects, writing
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borderlands 8:2
that Rancière’s egalitarianism, no less than Schiller’s notion of play
risks confinement to the ‘unsubstantial kingdom of the imagination.’ It
would seem that Rancière would be inclined to agree when he asserts
that a significant question for the present time is whether the
substitutive political role of contemporary art ‘can reshape political
spaces’ or must remain ‘content with parodying them’ (Rancière,
2009b: 60). As he has said his enquiry ‘has often been suspected of
proposing a return to […] aesthetic utopias’ or of being out of step with
the artistic practices and political issues of the 21st century, when all
he has done is to point to the ‘tensions and contradictions […] which
sustain the dynamic of artistic creation’ and ‘set up in a more accurate
way the issue of what art can be and can do today’ (Rancière, 2008c:
14).
As for artists, whether they are homosexual or not, there are
challenges they face that only the performative political power of
aesthetic experience itself can answer as they participate in le partage
du sensible by staging equality as powerfully and ‘theatrically’ as they
can in the hope that they might decimate the oppressive
sedimentations of established order.
Postscript
As Rancière sees it, the peculiar paradox of the specifically aesthetic
revolution is that art is radically political not according to the ways it
conveys messages concerning social or political issues or ethnic or
sexual identities, but as it frames and reframes an indifferent
convivium: the liberty and equality of a common aesthetic sensorium.
In a talk launching the English translation of Le Partage du sensible:
Esthétique et Politique (The Politics of Aesthetics) at the ICA London
in February 2005, Rancière described the museum as an egalitarian
space for the staging of this common sensorium: the place where
spectators confront art works disconnected from the inequality of ‘their
former function as icons of faith, emblems of power, or decoration of
palaces.’
I completed this paper in Southern Italy not far from the museum at
Paestum, where the Greek mural paintings in the 475 BC ‘Tomb of
the Diver’ are displayed. One of these murals uninhibitedly celebrates
same sex desire: specifically the socially circumscribed pederastic
desire between a bearded erastes and a smooth faced eromenos.
Today we as disinterested museum spectators within the purview of
the contemporary convivium of the aesthetic regime can bear witness
to the contemporaneity of the timeless pleasures of education and
desire. Such desire continues to be denied free expression when its
staging remains tied to ethical and representational rules and
regulations. Today we identify with the spectatorial relish evident in
the figure on the left of this scene, and take pleasure in this image as
it traces the equality of its intelligibility to anybody and everybody as
we are communally ‘tied together’ by the ‘sensory fabric’ of this
‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2008c: 4).
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borderlands 8:2
Roger Cook initially trained as a painter at the Slade School of
Fine Art, University College London, and until his retirement in
2005 taught in the Fine Art Department at the University of
Reading where he also taught Lesbian & Gay Studies on the
Body & Representation MA. He has a PhD in the History of Art
and since 2006 he has been a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of
Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London where his
research interests are contemporary art, French philosophy and
the historical, social and political relevance of dandyism.
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